Photo: Courtesy of Luciano Moreira, Anil Ghosh, Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena NEW LARVAE ON THE BLOCK: Transgenic and nontransgenic Anopheles stephensi larvae. The latter is recognizable by its green-glowing eyes, thanks to green fluorescent protein. Despite decades of control and treatment efforts, from DDT to antimalarial drugs, more than one million people die from malaria every year and hundreds of millions more become infected. It seems that as soon as a new tool emerges, a new form of resi

Tree clone project is more for love than logic.

Image: Courtesy of William McGinnis LOTSALEGS: The six-limbed fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster As school children are commonly taught, adult insects have six legs. No more, no less. But there's more to this story. The class Insecta is descended from multilimb ancestors, and most other living arthropods, including Insecta's closest living relative, the Crustacea, usually have at least five pairs of legs or leg-like appendages. How insects lost their limbs has interested those in the bu

Optimism and doubts expressed at discussion of $1,000 genome.

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Microbiology has come a long way since the days of Anton van Leeuwenhoek and his "very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving." The animalcules were, of course, bacteria, and Leeuwenhoek's 17th century observations were among the first written records of microbial life. Now, as exemplified by two recent Faculty of 1000 papers, microbiologists are

In 1975, Mary-Claire King and the late Allan Wilson, both then at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that the genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees is simply too small to account for the dramatic anatomical and behavioral differences between the two species.1 No matter what method scientists used to measure genetic distance--protein electrophoresis, DNA hybridization, immunology, or amino acid sequencing--the result was always the same: Humans and chimpanzees are 98.7% ge

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 24 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next Nature's Own Version of Superglue Understanding how insect feet adhere to slippery, wet surfaces has been a centuries-long quest | By Leslie Pray Image: Courtesy of Isle of Wight History Centre A close-up picture of the common fly. "The foot of a fly is a most admirable and curious contrivance, for by this the flies are enabled t

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 34 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next Refining Transgenic Mice Emerging technologies allow researchers to make tissue- and developmental stage-specific knockouts | By Leslie Pray Image: Courtesy of Taconic Farms MOUSE HOUSE: Scientists at Taconic's Molecular Analysis Laboratory genotype transgenic rat and mouse lines. Mice have been freeloading on humans for millenni

Proteins have a notoriously difficult time traversing the hydrophobic layers of the plasma membrane. But some species, such as Bacillus anthracis, have devised clever ways to push their proteins through. Anthrax kills with a toxin, a compound composed of three proteins—protective antigen (PA), lethal factor (LF), and edema factor (EF)—that somehow penetrate the plasma membrane of the host cell and enter the cytosol where they make their kill. Antibiotics against anthrax attack the b

The Faculty of 1000 is a Web-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. It provides a continuously updated insider's guide to the most important peer-reviewed papers within a range of research fields, based on the recommendations of a faculty of more than 1,400 leading researchers. Each issue, The Scientist publishes a list of top-rated papers from a specific subject area, as well as a short review of one or more of the listed papers. We also publish a selection of comments on

After a three-year effort, scientists have determined the crystal structure of edema factor, a toxic protein secreted by Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes anthrax.1 Edema factor (EF) works in concert with two other anthrax proteins—protective antigen (PA) and lethal factor (LF)—to kill its host cell. PA's crystal structure was reported in 19972 and LF's in November 2001.3 With this three-dimensional map now in hand, researchers are making headway into understanding how the

For this article, Leslie Pray interviewed Tobias Bonhoeffer, managing director, chairman of the board, and cellular and systems neurobiology department head at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munchen-Martinsried, Germany. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. F. Engert, T. Bonhoeffer, "Dendritic spine changes associated with hippocampal long-term synaptic plasticity,